The high-density, low-power-consumption HP Moonshot servers are now commercially available with Intel Atom S1200 "Centerton" processors, but versions based on other CPUs including the Intel "Avoton" and Calxeda EnergyCore ARM are expected to ship later this year.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said the company needs to focus on innovation and the channel to help right its financial foundation, while HP General Counsel John Schultz confirmed the appointment of a committee to investigate HP's Autonomy and ECS acquisitions.

SMBs without dedicated GPU-based graphics workstations may be able to run high-performance applications from companies like Adobe, Autodesk and Dassault via their client devices connected to the GPU-heavy Nvidia Grid VCA.

VMware's software-defined data center strategy is based on the company's ability to make virtualized compute, storage and networking resources available to provide a scalable infrastructure in which applications can run regardless of the underlying hardware.

Software-defined data center, energy management and hybrid clouds are just some of the emerging areas in the data center market, according to APC and VMware executives who participated in an XChange Solution Provider panel.

Relatively strong North American server sales managed to overcome the significant slowdown in servers to the EMEA market in 2012, but the entire market fell as a whole, analyst firms Gartner and IDC said.